Way to waste my time, Liberty Ross

When the new Vanity Fair cover was revealed earlier this week, Lainey commented, “Vanity Fair is out for blood all over the place.” We’re all waiting for the big expose on Goop, they’re reportedly pressuring Nigella Lawson to participate in a feature story, and the topline of the new cover boasts, The Wife Who Outfoxed Kristen Stewart. Given their sudden machine-gun-style attack on celebrities, I, like most of you, saw that and immediately thought we’d be getting some smutty smut about last year’s cheating scandal involving Stewart, her married director Rupert Sanders and his model wife Liberty Ross. Well VF has released their exclusive with Ross and it’s F*CKING LAME.

Look, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be cheated on, especially when you’ve been together nearly half your life and have a couple of kids. I don’t know how anyone gets through something like that, and I’m convinced the people who do are halfway to sainthood because I’m pretty sure my reaction to infidelity would involve a lot of lighter fluid and like, thousands of matches. I can’t fathom what Ross has been through and the fact that she didn’t set Rupert Sanders on fire impresses me on a certain level. But this? This weak-ass “one year later” BS that belongs in Us Weekly? Ain’t nobody got time for this sh*t.

What Ross did here was waste my gossip time. Gossip time is finite and must be rationed—for instance, here at LaineyGossip no one bothers with reality TV and its stars. Vanity Fair, with that provocative headline, made this story sound like a must read, but the exclusive is boring. Take out the names, and Ross’s story could be any business wife, putting her own ambitions on hold to support her husband’s career and raise their kids and then it turns out he’s banging the hot young thing at work. It doesn’t diminish Ross’s pain, which I’m sure is very real, but this story is literally a dime a dozen. It does not deserve the headline it got. How, exactly, did she outfox Kristen Stewart?

Unless we’re talking PR strategy. Because Ross’s game was WAY better than Stewart’s. This is what pained me the most about Stewart’s scandal last year. Not what she did—it was moronic and disappointing but if I got bent out of shape every time a young actress did something like that, I would be permanently crooked—but how she handled it. There was never any organized strategy of either retreat or rebuilding. It was just floundering and then silence.

Meanwhile, Ross was making a point of being seen (which doesn’t really jive with the image of her being “completely secluded”), always looking put together and with her chin up. It made her even more sympathetic than being the wronged party already made her, made her look strong and in control even as her world fell apart. I recall a lot of “unnamed sources” speaking on her behalf, but nothing from Ross herself, which gave her plausible deniability with the public so that nearly a year and a half later she can make the claim that she retreated and “let it all roll past her”. It was good media management, well executed.

Or it was, up until this exclusive. Now I’m side-eyeing Liberty Ross. Now I’m thinking, What do you want? What is this supposed to do for you? Because you waited over a year to speak out and now that you finally have, you have said nothing interesting. You jockeyed, you positioned, you bided your time, and then you came in here and wasted my gossip time. For what? If you’re going to wait a year-plus to give an exclusive to a major magazine about one of the biggest celebrity scandals in recent memory, and in doing so shovel more sh*t on a person who, yes, f*cked up incredibly, but who also ought to be allowed to put her life back together at some point, make it worth my gossip time. This was not worth my gossip time.